Top Menu

Follow Us:

Liquidating Syria, Fracking Europe

Volume XXII

Winter

Number 4

Leila Hudson

Dr. Hudson is an associate professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. An anthropologist and historian, she directs the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts and is currently working on an ethnography of the Syrian migration.

By the end of September 2015, 8,000 refugees and migrants, most of them Syrian, were arriving in Europe every day. By November, even with the onset of winter, that number had risen to an average of 8,700, with as many as 10,000 arriving on Greek shores on one October day. As of November 2015, the UNHCR counted 744,000 arrivals for the year, nearly triple the 219,000 who came in 2014.1 The millions displaced by Syria's civil war and hundreds of thousands making their way by foot, boat, train, bus, car and truck across Eastern Europe are people hoping to live and work in peace and dignity somewhere on the planet. They are not a swarm or an invasion or a metastasis.2 As the aftermath of the November 13 Paris massacres showed, refugees do not seem to be a vector for terrorism, which is more easily incubated domestically and through communications networks. They are girls, boys, men and women, and every one of them has a full complement of ordinary hopes, fears and dreams. Most have experienced trauma and mustered tremendous willpower and determination.3 How the world treats them will have consequences for all.

What might one day be remembered as the Great Syrian Migration for its scale, or the Syrian Exodus for its epic and tragic character, is currently referred to as the European migration crisis. The proto-genocidal war in Syria, and even the pressures of four million refugees on Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey are by any measure more critical than the challenges to Europe's immigration and integration policies. However, these problems were easier for the global north to dismiss as part of a chronically benighted and distant Middle East. There has been some media controversy over this Eurocentric framing of the issue and how to refer to these asylum seekers. Al-Jazeera announced a policy decision to avoid the word "migrant" and exclusively use the word "refugee," as flight from war zones creates de facto refugees.4 Under the spirit of the 1951 Geneva Convention, the fact of displacement generates refugee status until proven otherwise.5 Most North American and European mainstream media outlets continue to use the term "migrant," assuming that it is neutral and descriptive, and that legal refugee status will be confirmed, de jure, by an asylum court or other formal national or international process.6 There are important legal implications depending on the word and assumptions used; those judged to be refugees have a path to asylum and legal status, while economic migrants are subject to deportation.7 The displaced people themselves often prefer not to be labeled and categorized.8

As this subject is discussed in the English-language media, the core of Syrian refugees is joined each week by people fleeing Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Bangladesh and recently even Iran and Lebanon. Refugees and migrants from other zones of war and poverty are joining the caravan to Europe, sometimes even claiming to be Syrian to gain an edge in the quest for asylum. Falsified Syrian papers are available for purchase from the same smugglers selling rubber dinghies on the Turkish coast.9 These non-Syrian refugees and migrants are pushed from their homes by inequality, fear and insecurity and lured by promises of freedom, tolerance and prosperity.10

The material facts of war and poverty and the ideals of peace, prosperity and dignity are intimately linked, and the resilient refugees and migrants are forcing them into the same frame of reference.11 The recognition of a legal category of "survival migration," in which people who flee from circumstances of environmental change, livelihood collapse and state fragility, or "existential threat for which they have no domestic remedy," may be the key to institutional accommodation for a wider range of circumstances.12 Until new norms are put in place, people fleeing to Europe are more likely to be assigned to a limbo of "subsidiary protection."13 This allows Geneva Convention refugee status to be forestalled by policy decisions of member states (much as Geneva-protected "enemy combatant" status was displaced by "terrorist" designations in the last decade).

The scale of the Syrian emigration, as with the destruction that precipitated it, is unique. With the Russian intervention of October 2015, it is likely to grow; estimates project up to 100,000 northern Syrians fleeing or preparing to flee in the face of the Russian air campaign. According to officials of the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), 63-70 percent of the people on the move this summer have been Syrian,14 and they represent a formidable percentage of their country's population. Half of all Syrians are internally displaced; four million out of 22 million have left the country for shelter in neighboring Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.15 When a million Syrians reach Europe later this year, they will represent 4-5 percent of Syria's original population.16

What the world is witnessing is the liquidation of Syria. The energy previously held in its wealth, cultural bonds and social structures is being unleashed, much of it destroyed on the spot, and some of it escaping the country and the region. Countries around Syria are being stressed — hydraulically fractured or fracked — by the expulsion of people and value. As many Europeans providing succor and thinking about creative integration realize, the people on the move are best engaged as individuals whose views and needs must be addressed.17 Those views and the mass movement they comprise will tell us much about the trickle-down effects of neoliberal capitalism and neoconservative militarism.18

LIQUIDATING SYRIA

Liquefaction — the process of a solid being rendered liquid — may be an apt metaphor for the destruction in Syria since 2011. Liquid also alludes to the watery fate of the nearly 3,000 who have drowned in the Mediterranean this year: an average of six every day of the migration.19 A more useful metaphor might be the financial liquidation and termination of an enterprise and conversion of its assets to cash at a loss. Unlike formal bankruptcy, raw liquidation moves from clandestine looting of assets to arson attacks (as in the regime slogan, "Assad or we burn the country")20 followed by stockholders' panic selling, resulting in the opportunistic acquisition of critical infrastructure by bottom feeders when blood literally runs in the streets. The desperate liquidation of a recoverable portion of Syrians' lives enriches networks of human smugglers and their deep-state partners, leaving the bulk of immovable assets to a collection of thuggish actors from ISIS to regime supporters at the local, regional and global levels.

A national fire sale is taking place in Syria. With government and now Russian aerial attacks rendering massive swaths of the urban landscape uninhabitable, the wanton destruction of private property in the form of real estate (Syria's primary form of wealth), the devastation of agriculture,21 and even attacks on public markets, the infrastructure of Syrian society is being torched.22 The government is propped up by Russian and Iranian reinforcements, now beginning to jostle for position vis-à-vis resource fields, pipelines and harbors.23 Extremists vie for territory, tribute bases and limelight.24 Barrel bombs and passports go for $300 apiece.25 Even ISIS cashes in (on an industrial scale), selling archaeological treasures that are not built into the landscape.26

The brain and body drain is far worse. The Assad regime has killed the majority of the quarter-million people who have died in the civil war. An Amnesty International investigation revealed that the "state profits from widespread and systematic enforced disappearances amounting to crimes against humanity, through an insidious black market in which family members desperate to find out the fates of their disappeared relatives are ruthlessly exploited for cash."27 Inflation and a lack of employment, except in the military and militias, have made life unbearable. As one refugee in Izmir explained to the Turkish daily Hurriyet:

Men aged between 18 and 35 are being recruited to the army. We do not want to fight, that is why we are running.... The ones who are married take their families with them.28

The people massing on the Macedonian, Hungarian and Croatian borders in August and September 2015 are engineers, pharmacists, journalists, laborers — people who would have made up a functioning civil society through the reforms demanded in the Arab-Spring prologue to the war. At least 40 percent of children have had their education critically disrupted.29 Syria has been hollowed out.

All the refugees making their way to Europe have paid thousands of dollars for the chance to risk their lives on the journey. The trip from Syria to Germany requires at a minimum 2,000 euros — an average of 1,500 euros per adult — to cross the Mediterranean in an overcrowded and unseaworthy craft, as well as hundreds of euros for provisions, lodging, SIM cards and overland transportation upon arrival.30 Luxury packages offered by entrepreneurial smugglers range far higher in price and include false visas and passports for $18,000 and even fraudulent Swedish marriages for $40,000.31 The far cheaper and safer option of getting to Europe by air is stymied by EU regulations that make airlines liable for, and thus hyper-vigilant about, air travel without a visa.32 Those whose cash runs out on the way or who are swindled by smugglers or robbed by bandits are stranded and forced to decamp in poor and hostile parts of Greece and the Balkans.

The thousands of families making their way across the sea and Eastern Europe have generally spent at least $5,000 to make their escape.33 The financial capital liquidated at a loss by these stakeholders of Syria comes from saved wealth, the sale of businesses, homes, land and vehicles, and from borrowing and scraping together resources from family networks. It is only a fraction of what Syrian families built and invested over generations in their corrupt state, but it represents in cold financial terms a huge amount of wealth. The liquidated savings are used up on the way to Europe, but the energy and resources that accumulated, mobilized and liberated the money are apparent in the people on the move. If they find smooth paths into immigrant-friendly economies, they can flourish in new forms of work and small local enterprise along the classic immigrant model. Or, just as so-called "hot money" diverted from long-term investment sloshes through and destabilizes financial systems in search of short-term interest differentials, the energy released by war and inequality can form a critical and unstable mass.

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA34

Turkey had been a destination of choice for northern Syrians seeking refuge since 2011-12, but the interest in the Aegean route to the Balkans seems to have been directly related to the maritime human-smuggling disasters on the route from Zuwara, Libya, to Italy, peaking in 2014 and the first half of 2015. On the Libyan and some parallel Egyptian routes, large decommissioned fishing boats and tankers that held hundreds of people traced the older routes used by African migrants for decades. This put people entirely at the mercy of trafficking gangs and stressed the resources of the regional coast guards, Frontex, and NGOs like Mare Nostrum.35 That Central Mediterranean route proved extremely dangerous, producing hundreds of known casualties as boats failed or were sabotaged by smugglers. Subsequently, Turkish-based traffickers bought large scrapped "ghost ships" to put on a GPS course to Italy without a crew. An eventual Turkish crackdown on these criminal enterprises resulted in the increase of small-boat traffic.36 By the spring of 2015, Syrians who had exhausted the bulk of their savings and the prospects of life in Turkey began to brave the modest distances and choppy waters of the Aegean, heading for the Greek islands and the European Union through the EU's free-passage area, the Schengen zone. By July 2015, among Syrians, Izmir came to mean an alternative route to Europe. According to one Turkish paper:

Hotels, coffee shops, parks, bus stops, fields and even sidewalks in the Basmane neighborhood of İzmir are now the homes of nearly 70,000 Syrian refugees. Most of them have been caught and released over a dozen times by the authorities while trying to reach Greece....[T]he İzmir authorities feel helpless because the refugees cannot be sent back to war-torn Syria and are determined to reach Europe....Syrians pay $1,000-2,000 per person to people smugglers... who can earn as much as $500,000 per day.37

The increase in Syrians in Izmir coincided with a manpower shortage in Assad's Syria, as many young men fled conscription:

"We do not aim to stay in Turkey; we came here to go to Greece." A group of five Syrian young men, who said that they had been sleeping near a wall in İzmir for the past week, said they were all university graduates and had professions but had fled Syria to avoid the draft. "We were working in Damascus, but we have not been able to see our family for two years. We fled to avoid being taken into the army. Money talks in Syria. If you give $300 you get a passport."38

Public consternation grew along the Aegean coast, provoking municipal officials to put control measures in place. Their aim was to manage the flow of Syrians into port cities and stem the lucrative business of human smuggling. There began to be talk of checkpoints outside Izmir; "clearing" the city's spaces became a priority. Syrians were bussed to a soccer stadium and thence to refugee camps around Turkey, deepening the Syrians' mistrust of the Turkish government's migration management.39 None of these measures slowed the flow of Syrians and a growing number of Iraqis, Afghans and others through Izmir.

The Aegean route from the Turkish coast to the Greek islands of Lesbos, Kos and others is much shorter than the Central Mediterranean one, taking hours rather than days and navigable with a small boat. The vessels provided by the smugglers range from speedboats and elderly fishing craft to the myriad 9-10-meter inflatable rubber dinghies powered by weak outboard motors; abandoned, they litter the coasts of the eastern Greek islands.40 Even life vests, including dangerously substandard ones, have proved profitable for unscrupulous merchants and traffickers.41 The central Mediterranean route required expensive satellite phones to stay in touch while at sea, but the short distance across the Aegean allowed the use of personal cell phones with SIM cards. Smart phones are being used to chart journeys and trade information. Waterproofing and phone charging is the highest priority for many, after food and water.42 Before departure and upon arrival, messaging apps and Facebook groups permit people to document their progress, trade information and keep in touch with loved ones.43

Naturally, there have been thousands of drownings, before and since three-year-old Alan Kurdi's tragic death was memorialized by the press.44 In addition to the effects of the choppy sea on small boats packed with non-swimmers, there are frequent reports of possible sabotage — and not just by rival gangs of smugglers, as on the central Mediterranean route. Refugees and Turkish fishermen have claimed to see people identifying themselves as the Greek coast guard deflating rubber boats full of Syrians on the way to Chios.45 Activists have reported dozens of incidents in which boats were deflated, engines stolen and passengers threatened and robbed by unknown assailants, some appearing to be coast-guard authorities.46 Thousands had already been rescued by July 2015, only to persist until the crossing was achieved.47 The reasons for the trans-Aegean surge, in short, had to do with the need of the Syrian war for manpower, the perils of the once-popular Libya-Italy route, the saturation of Turkey with Syrian refugees, the drying up of their savings, and a cost/benefit analysis and risk assessment encouraging people to brave the journey.48 The damaging effects were evident in the streets and beaches, in the stresses on local authorities and institutions, and in the horrifying death toll.

GREECE ON THE FRONT LINE

Greece had scarcely put its debt crisis into a financially induced coma when it became clear that Lesbos and Kos were unable to handle the Aegean alternative to the Libya-Italy routes. It was transforming the islands' landscapes by May 2015:

Cafes lining the beachfront on Greece's Kos that would usually be packed with holidaymakers have become the unlikely first port of call for thousands of refugees....Struggling to provide basic hospitality and services like toilets, running water, electricity and food, these cafes have tried to adapt and fill in for a remarkable dearth of government assistance to the refugees. But with many tourists now avoiding the beachfront — one of the front lines of Europe's biggest migrant crisis since World War II — as they choose to dine and party in downtown Kos instead, well-meaning cafe owners have started to turn the refugees away.49

Initially, locals on the islands and even tourists attempted to assist the travelers who began to arrive in predictable patterns, with a typical day in August bringing not just Syrian refugees, but regular arrivals of boats full of Afghan and Pakistani men.50 Soon the number of refugees and migrants exceeded the local population, with Lesbos alone estimating 90,000 refugees passing through in August.51 The United Nations noted the chaos on the islands, and Prime Minister Tsipras countered that the problem was a "humanitarian crisis within (an economic) crisis."52 Ironically, changes proposed and made by the Syriza party when it came to power in winter 2015 that eased Greece's previous policy of detaining and returning immigrants to Turkey may also have contributed to the redirection of the refugee path.53 As in Izmir, public safety became an issue; fights broke out in crowded refugee-processing centers.54 The public-health predicament was abysmal as well, with refuse and sanitation issues imperiling those interned in the camps.55 By September, many Syrians found that the Lesbos experience made the previously intolerable situation in Lebanon look good.56

Eventually, the Greek government responded to calls for national accountability,57 and Athens arranged for more orderly transport, commissioning ferries to take registered refugees by the thousands to the mainland.58 This was facilitated by processing centers set up in island stadiums where travelers were issued temporary transit documents.59 But, clearly, the situation was beyond the abilities of the already stressed Syriza party.60 Initial panic about the stranded travelers yielded to practical organization when it became clear that the vast majority were as eager to be on their way as the locals were to be rid of them.61 However, as more ferries transported them to the mainland, a new influx would arrive. The numbers were staggering: by mid-August, 21,000 people arrived in Greece in a single week, nearly half the total of the entire previous year, according to the UNHCR. By November, over 210,000 had passed through Greece compared with 8,129 arriving in Italy during 2015.62

BALKAN TRAILS AND TRIALS

From Athens and Thessaloniki, the Syrian refugees and other migrants began the long overland part of their trip. During the Balkan Wars and World War I, Arabs from the Ottoman provinces were drafted in a general mobilization and set off on an overland march to the empire's western end in Europe. They called it safarbarlik, the overland route; the word has come to signify a road of misery and hardship into the unknown. The Balkan migrant route is also a trail into the unknown, but navigated with smart phones, Google Maps and a rough understanding of national xenophobias and international treaties.63 The final destination is Germany or Sweden. The intermediate goal through the summer was to reach the visa-free Schengen zone at the Hungarian or, since its closure in September, the Slovenian border.64 The main route has bypassed countries known to be hostile (Bulgaria, Albania) or difficult to navigate (Montenegro, Bosnia), minimizing the number of non-Schengen border crossings and security forces encountered. There is a perceived and real danger that interception anywhere between Greece and Austria might at best mean registering for asylum, per the Dublin agreement, in a country (Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, the Czech Repubic and Slovakia) where imprisonment and deportation are more likely outcomes than asylum. Dublin rules, prior to this summer, have been generally interpreted to mean that asylum seekers may only apply for asylum in a single signatory country, precluding eventual resettlement and family reunification under the more liberal German or Swedish national guidelines.

The main route used from April through September 2015 leads from the port city of Thessaloniki and the border town of Polikastro in Greece into Macedonia and on through Serbia to Hungary. That central Balkan route avoids Bulgaria to the east (presented as an alternate route from Greece to Austria on Google Maps), which had been notorious for poor treatment of migrants and refugees even before the migration began.65 Another unpopular route runs through Albania, the only country whose applications for asylum in the EU outnumbered those of Syria as recently as 2014.66 The Croatian route to the west, also presented by Google Maps as a viable alternative, was avoided, probably due to an extra gauntlet of Dublin-signatory but non-Schengen border crossings and a reputation for poverty, xenophobia and land mines. This changed in mid-September, with the final closing of the Hungarian border, and Croatia became a main route.67 The Czech Republic and Slovakia, north of the most direct route and both EU and Schengen members, did not enhance the reputation of former East Bloc countries in the minds of travelers or the international community. Czech police, unmoved by historical comparison with the Nazis,68 were found to be inscribing numbers on people's arms with indelible ink.69 Slovakia was equally problematic, restricting its refugee acceptance to a couple of hundred Christians.70 A new route that avoids both the Aegean and the Balkan gauntlet grew in popularity as winter set in. The Arctic route used by only a dozen people in all of 2014 now leads hundreds of asylum seekers a month through Russia to Norway. This border to a non-EU but Schengen and Dublin-friendly safe haven with a long Swedish frontier is closed to pedestrians and transport in private motor vehicles, but is traversable by bicycle. By November 2015, hundreds of Syrians and others were stranded in the Russian town of Nickel due to a shortage of bicycles, especially the cheap childrens' bicycles that had been selling for $200 a piece, ridden for 200 meters across the border, abandoned and crushed on the Norwegian side rather than resold or reused.71

By the middle of August, 2,000 refugees were passing through Macedonia every day, double the number previous monthly. By November, that number had doubled again. Those who can afford train tickets, taxis or private cars can cross in a few hours. Many more have walked part or all the way, either due to lack of funds or, towards the end of the summer, to avoid blocked borders and the warehousing of travelers in makeshift camps, to wait for transport and the dreaded registration. The dog days of summer 2015 revealed chaos, fear, xenophobia and signs of panic by officials at the Macedonian border:

Those who could not cross spent the rainy and chilly night in the open with little food and water. They massed close to a razor wire separating them from machine-gun-toting Macedonian policemen. Some raised their babies above their heads to try to persuade the policemen to let them through. "These men are heartless," said Yousef, a Syrian refugee who gave only his first name, as he held a little wide-eyed girl with curly hair in his arms and pointed toward the policemen. "They don't care about our tragedy."72

Macedonian and Serbian officials were quick to point out that, as non-EU countries, they were dealing with a flow from EU-member Greece to EU countries to the north and west, and that the refugee problem was not theirs to deal with.73 After escalating to the use of stun guns and tear gas, a state of emergency was declared to deal with about 3,000 migrants in August.74 Macedonian police eventually discovered that letting the refugees and migrants pass through was the best solution for the logistical difficulties until a more systematic way could be found.75 A similar situation was unfolding on Macedonia's northern border with Serbia; a backlog of 5,000 held up for registration was finally let through toward the end of August.76 The authorities found that buses and special trains moving people towards Hungary were a better solution than wire fences and stun grenades.77 Overwhelmed, the authorities in both Macedonia and Serbia simply determined to facilitate transit from Greece to Hungary.

Throughout the summer of 2015, Hungary marked the re-entry into the passport-free Schengen area of Europe. At Serbia's border with Hungary, the last formal boundary of continental Europe,78 scenes similar to those at the Greek and Macedonian borders were playing out into August:

Crouched in the darkness, 500 metres from the Hungarian border, 15 Syrian refugees whisper about how they should cross into the EU. A few miles back, they switched off their phones. Then they picked up sticks to protect themselves from local gangsters. Now they're organising into pairs: going two-by-two means they might not trigger the heat sensors on the border. And it is at this moment that a 23-year-old pharmacist, Mohamed Hussein, absent-mindedly decides to light a cigarette. "Put it out!" comes the collective hiss, betraying a rising sense of fear. Several in this group have previously been jailed for a fortnight by the Hungarian police after crossing the border, before being returned to Serbia. Now they're trying again.79

The tension and congestion were heightened even further by the insistence of the Hungarian authorities on registering entrants and erecting a razor-wire fence at the Serbian border.80 The fence was authorized in June and completed by early September: a 175km, 4m-high barrier made of concertina wire, costing $106 million. The construction of camps for the housing of refugees and migrants awaiting processing was part of the package. As the fence was being erected, it simply caused travelers to speed up their journey into Hungary. Under construction, it forced people to cross at railroad gaps and brought attention to the rail system of Europe as the infrastructure of the great migration.81

Budapest's Keleti train station became an ad hoc refugee camp. The Hungarian authorities at first tried stopping trains to Austria and Germany. Then they briefly used deception to force people onto trains bound for registration camps. This prompted travelers to walk en masse along on the highway towards Vienna. Expecting increases of tens of thousands of people crossing into Hungary even as the rail and camp crisis made the country far from welcoming,82 the response of the government was harsh; it blamed Germany's open-door policy for the crisis.83 Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban quickly became the face of European resistance to the migration, declaring it a threat to the Christian culture of Europe.84 The unapologetic mayor of a Hungarian town produced a video attempting to scare refugees away from their territory.85 Hungary's international reputation had been first tarnished by the discovery of a commercial truck with the remains of over 70 men, women and children just inside Austria. Two weeks later, a Hungarian video journalist for a right-wing outlet was filmed kicking and tripping refugee families fleeing from police.86 By the time the fence was completed, refugees and migrants needed little persuasion to head west to Croatia. Both Croatia's Serbian and Slovenian borders have since become new bottlenecks and flashpoints.

After the cold reception in Hungary, prosperous and initially welcoming Austria marked the beginning of the western European Schengen zone; it was only one seamless train trip away from the promised land of Germany.87 But, alarmed by the prospect of being seen as a destination itself, the Austrian government quickly pulled back, announcing plans to phase out the emergency measures that had eased the Hungarian bottleneck.88 By the beginning of October, Austria too was feeling national anxieties about the effect of an estimated 80,000 asylum seekers on a population of 8.5 million. Vienna began temporarily housing asylum seekers in neighboring Slovakia, a temporary solution resented by both refugees and Slovakians.89

THE PROMISE OF GERMANY

The perception of Germany as the most liberal and generous of safe havens has been the pull to the Syrian civil war's push. The country that caused the massive refugee crisis of World War II attracted 2015's record number of refugees and migrants with its constitutional commitment to asylum for those in need.90 The announced willingness of the German government and population to accept up to 800,000 asylum seekers has historical, cultural and economic logic. The legacy of the Nazi Holocaust, the experience of absorbing Turkish Gastarbeiter into the economic revival of the 1950s and ʼ60s, the prosperity of the country and expected decline in its labor force, allowed the government and a majority of its people to be open to immigration. The draw of Germany — and to a lesser extent Sweden — hinges on a perception of prosperity and openness to foreigners widely disseminated through the mass media as well as information and impressions traded on social media.91 In the wake of the hardships of the road through early September, Germans seemed even more welcoming; they made a point of warmly receiving the refugees, easing rules and receiving people with enthusiasm.92 But within less than a month, Chancellor Angela Merkel's government tempered its policies under growing public pressure, calling with renewed emphasis for European refugee quotas at a tense European Union summit on September 23.93 With the increasingly frequent arson attacks on refugee shelters, the persistent threat of the right-wing Pegida group and its ilk, and the recalcitrance of less receptive EU members — even Germany is rethinking its refugee policy in the wake of the breakdown of the Schengen and Dublin agreements.

But through the late fall of 2015, Germany's open door is still seen as an invitation by asylum seekers, not only from Syria, but from a growing number of places in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. Extremists are more likely to reside in or enter Europe by conventional means, but the lack of a coherent management system means that it would not be out of the question for terrorists or criminals to join the migration undetected.

Germany, by invoking the "sovereignty clause" of the Dublin Agreement on refugee distribution to facilitate rather than block migration, stands in contrast to other EU member nations. Its regular, timely and predictable processing of asylum cases and issuing of stipends, residency and work permits is seen as far more sympathetic than the national policies of other European countries. A liberal family reunification policy that only in summer 2015 was amended to exclude certain categories of more distant kin is also well known among asylum seekers. As a report of the Red Cross points out, other EU and Schengen members on the route compare unfavorably in the process of granting asylum and family reunification. Hungary, even before its border crisis, confers the lesser "subsidiary protection" status more often than full refugee status, thus preventing family-reunification. Hungary is also known to have prohibitively inconsistent, slow and bureaucratic consular procedures compared with those in Germany. Austria, too, was cited by the Red Cross as having particularly long waiting periods and high documentation thresholds for status processing and family reunification.94 Germany and Sweden had the reputation of giving the benefit of the doubt to de facto refugees, while Austria's and Hungary's procedures are seen as narrow, bureaucratic and negatively biased. Differences that appear minuscule to outside observers are life-changing to refugees, enough to keep them moving, even accelerating, toward their ultimate goal. The panic among those who have set their sights on German asylum at being registered in other Schengen countries — or worse, non-EU countries — is not due to opportunism but a clear assessment of the risk of being trapped in administrative limbo.

FRACKING EUROPE

A team of physicists working on the morphological similarities between networks of paths in the human environment and cracks in nature observed:

.... the road network as a resultant of human activity and the crack patterns in nature have a positive resemblance to each other, suggesting a possible interpretation by similar mechanism. ... [s]tress increases as the (route) becomes ... a detour to the destination, whereas it decreases as a shortcut is developed in such a manner as to minimize the effort to get to the destination. The realization of roads convenient for all people, therefore, means the reduction of social stress, and this corresponds to the release of mechanical stress on a plane by forming cracks.95

Pathways to asylum, one might extrapolate, reduce the transregional stress of Syria's devastating liquidation. Blocking and friction do nothing to reverse the process, but channel social stress that could be released in direct paths to asylum into the underlying substrate, ultimately to manifest as cracks in the underlying social and cultural structures. Syria's neighbors — Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey — have already encountered serious challenges to their infrastructure under the extra burden of the first four million Syrian refugees. In these states, the refugees have had perceptible effects on labor and housing markets, schools and health care and even utility infrastructure. But even in Lebanon, where Syrian refugees now make up a full quarter of the population, they have not "broken" the country. When peoples' savings and patience began to run out in 2014 and Arab countries became saturated, Turkey became a more attractive destination, even for Syrians from outside the northern border region. By 2014, as more Syrians had entered Turkey than Lebanon and Jordan combined, Europe became not just a destination for elite students and those with family connections, wealth or visas, but an alternative for a mass demographic.

As refugees flee west and north into Europe, they are exposing and challenging the contradictions between the global north's ideals of rights, citizenship and humanity, on the one hand, and the standard operating procedure of global militarism, war, neoliberal capitalist inequality and xenophobia, on the other. They are also challenging the various notions of European unity. Just as the Greek debt crisis earlier in 2015 highlighted the perils of an economic union without a central fiscal policy, the European asylum crisis highlights the weakness of a complex citizenship and residence system without a unified and consistent immigration and asylum policy. The Dublin process whereby asylum seekers may only apply in a single country, usually the country of entry, has been scuttled; knowledgeable refugees seek to register in the country with the most beneficial policies on status and family reunification: Germany and Sweden. The Schengen zone has been undermined as the sheer number of people crossing national borders has triggered security anxiety and caused individual countries to impose national passport control and registration. The Western European values of inclusion, welfare and human rights have sparked a backlash among Eastern European nations touting an exclusionary Christian identity, not to mention a resurgence in right-wing anti-immigrant sectors throughout Europe.

Just as the process of Syria's destruction can be compared to the liquidation of a company, the effects of the refugee crisis in Europe resemble fracking, forcing pressurized liquids into rock and shale to crack them open to extract oil and gas. Syrians and other refugees and migrants are following ferry lines, roads, trails and railroad tracks north and west. When they are trapped in unseaworthy boats, blocked by fences, corralled in camps or forcibly redistributed by European regulations, there will be a contest between their resilience, determination and energy and the brittleness of the stressed structures. Wherever they are resisted becomes a potential cracking point for the fragile institutions of unified Europe. European solidarity continues to be challenged as different countries react to the migration independently. Twenty-eight different solutions, most of them defensive and xenophobic, can split the Dublin and Schengen accords apart. The ideal of a united Europe grows weaker every day.96 The circumstances forcing value out of Syria can destabilize Europe, challenging its fragile structures, already weakened by the 2015 north-south debt crisis.

As the migrants move towards an unknown future, they take heart from proclaimed enlightenment values, their own sheer numbers and the shared humanity of their fellow travelers. Stories of conscience and empathy abound as people distinguish themselves by acts of solidarity and compassion. Thousands of people, even in the least hospitable transit states, provide food, water, clothing, first aid and kindness. Volunteer drivers, in contrast to smugglers, take families uncompensated to Germany.97 The sick, elderly and disabled are wheeled and carried across the continent. Technology and goodwill allow many of the lost to find their families, and the best European administrative practices allow families to be reunited in safety.98 If the human potential flowing into Europe is channeled into paths to peace, dignity, work and integration, it will make Europe richer, more diverse and more flexible. If that potential is blocked, concentrated, segregated and antagonized, its energy will continue to form cracks, not just in supranational structures but also the national fabrics of Europe, by exposing and exacerbating cultural contradictions.

Neither liquidation nor fracking is a natural process. They are man-made engineering techniques designed to break down structures. The people coming out of Syria and into Europe are not a flood threatening to overwhelm the bastions of civilization. The temptation to see them that way, to demonize them as the source of danger, exacerbates a key crack running through modern enlightenment culture: that between universalism and xenophobia. It also distracts from the next phase of the bloody restructuring of the Middle East that weaponizes human misery and energy. Bashar al-Assad, Ali Khameini and Vladimir Putin understand that they control the war that pushes huge numbers of people towards Europe. The deep Turkish state and a network of thugs, terrorists and traffickers know that they control key parts of the transit route leading into the weakest parts of Europe. These engineers, variously rebuffed, humiliated and threatened by Europe and the United States for decades, will not hesitate to increase pressure on political systems already riddled with contradictions.

11 The forces that push desperate people out of Syria and belatedly into the public's consciousness are large, mechanical and systematic on a global scale. Neoconservative military action, manifest in the fiasco of the "global war on terror," and neoliberal capitalism have combined to leave the region stripped of any checks on murderously acquisitive local authoritarianism. They have a fluid dynamic. These are the same kinds of forces of inequality and violence that push Central Americans onto "la Bestia" train and Mexican workers across the hellish Sonoran Desert to the agricultural labor market in the north.

13 UNHCR, "Refugee Status, Subsidiary Protection, and the Right to be Granted Asylum Under EC Law, María-Teresa Gil-Bazo," October 2, 2015, http://www.unhcr.org/455993882.html.

14 UNHCR, "Number of Refugees and Migrants Arriving in Greece Soars 750 Percent over 2014," September 25, 2015, http://www.unhcr.org/55c4d1fc2.html. This quote pertained to July 2015 and it seems that the percentages of non-Syrians were growing by fall 2015.

33 Half a million refugees paying $3,000 apiece to escape make a $1.5 billion dollar investment in escape to Europe alone. The scenes of chaos at the way stations on the great migration are read by racists and xenophobes as barbarian irrationality and threat. In fact, they are the result of cold, rational calculation and risk assessment.

About MEPC

The Middle East Policy Council is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to contribute to American understanding of the political, economic and cultural issues that affect U.S. interests in the Middle East.